Shared from Ryan Holmes

They’re the generation brought up on Facebook. Some have never known a world without the Internet. The innermost details of their lives have been exhaustively Instagramed and they get their news from Twitter, not TV.

But when it comes to using social media in the workplace, millennials – the generation whose birth years can range anywhere from 1980 and 2000 – can be surprisingly, even dangerously, unprepared. “Because somebody grows up being a social media native, it doesn’t make them an expert in using social media at work,” says William Ward, professor of social media at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. “That’s like saying, ‘I grew up with a fax machine, so that makes me an expert in business.'”

For students and recent grads, some social media 101 is definitely in order.

Lacking in critical areas

According to Ward, who teaches a series of popular undergraduate and graduate courses on social media at the university, millennials are lacking in a number of critical areas. While they’re very good at connecting with people they already know, they often fail to understand the professional opportunities and pitfalls posed by networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

“Companies hire millennials because they think they’re good at social media. Then their bosses discover they don’t have those skills and get frustrated,” Ward says, noting that social media expectations are often higher for millennials than for older workers, who may be just as inept.

For students and recent grads entering the workforce, some social media 101 is definitely in order. In particular, career-minded millennials desperately need to brush up on these five social media skills:

1. Knowing when not to share

Recently, Business Insider attracted attention for firing its CTO, Pax Dickinson, because of comments he made on his personal Twitter account. While Dickinson’s Tweets on women and minorities were especially offensive, the situation hints at a larger issue. Millennials sometimes fail to appreciate that personal profiles can have professional repercussions. Twitter, Facebook and other networks are largely public platforms; comments made can – and often do – get back to bosses. As the Dickinson case shows, few employers are eager to associate themselves with off-color or offensive content, even when it may be intended as a joke.

2. Using social media to actually save time

According to a 2013 Salary.com survey, the most frequently visited personal website at work is – you guessed it – Facebook. As networks proliferate – and millennial employees not only check Facebook but post on Twitter, browse Instagram and more – social media has the potential to be a devastating time-suck. Yet it can also be a time saver in the office. A recent McKinsey reportnotes that social media has the potential to save companies $1.3 trillion, largely owing to improvements in intra-office collaboration. Internal social networks like Yammer enable employees to form virtual work groups and communicate on message boards. Instead of endless back-and-forths on email, co-workers can post and reply in continually updated streams. None of this is revolutionary, but millennials are often still in the dark on ways Facebook-like innovations are being taken behind the firewall.

3. Understanding how to crunch the numbers

While millennials often have an intuitive understanding of what resonates on social channels (hard to go wrong with cat GIFs), quantifying what works and what doesn’t is another matter. Should the success of a Twitter campaign be measured on the basis of retweets, mentions, replies, referral traffic or sales leads? What are the best times of day to post on Facebook and what is the optimum post frequency? Which analytical tools are best for crunching the numbers? While social media is about authentic, human interaction, it’s also an arena where data can easily be collected and applied to improve results. Knowing what data to look for, where to find it and what to do with it separates real experts from mere social natives.

4. Mastering the multi-network shuffle

It’s one thing to be a Twitter guru or have a huge LinkedIn following. The real talent lies in orchestrating different platforms to work together and in understanding the niche each fills. Visual networks such as Instagram and YouTube, for instance, are increasingly the foundation of campaigns by social-savvy brands such as Nike, Red Bull and Mercedes. Catchy images and videos are, in turn, seeded onto traditional text-based networks such as Twitter and Facebook. From there, links lead viewers back to blogs and company pages, sending customers spiraling deeper into the sales funnel. Meanwhile, uniform hashtags across platforms help unify and track the overall campaign. Even millennials with deep social credentials often fail to understand the profound multiplying effects of integrating different networks.

5. Networking professionally on social media

By the time millennials graduate, many have dutifully filled their LinkedIn profiles with part-time positions, internships, extra-curriculars and academic accomplishments. But the network’s true job-finding power is often overlooked: Hiring managers and CEOs who would normally be out of reach are often just a connection or two away. In fact, you don’t need to be connected at all. A paid feature called InMail, for instance, enables users to send emails directly to any one of LinkedIn’s 277 million members. Truly enterprising job seekers can hunt down big fish like Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Deepak Chopra, then send a pitch straight to their inbox. Notoriously footloose millennials – forever in search of the next job opportunity – might well take this tip to heart when searching for greener professional pastures.

The plug ‘n play myth

Of course, amassing these skills is no short order, and millennials aren’t the only offenders. “The real problem is that we expect people to know these skills without providing any training,” social media professor Ward says. As the number of social networks expands and platforms are used in more sophisticated ways, it’s unreasonable to expect anyone – even the most plugged-in users – to just intuitively get it.

But there are options for millennials hoping to brush up on social media skills. “There are lots of online training programs out there,” Ward explains, “though some are better than others.”

He cautions learners to stick to programs offering industry-recognised certification, like the most widely used offering, Hootsuite University, an offering from my company which has seen 50,000 people enroll since it was started in 2011 and is also used in 400 higher education programs.

For millennials competing in a tight market, these skills – unheard of just a decade ago – can mean the difference between finding and keeping a job. “Students using digital and social media professionally in an integrated and strategic way … have an advantage,” Ward says. “[They’re] getting better jobs and better internships.”

Like this:

In many ways, the social media experience is much like being in crowded train station at the end of a workday. There are countless people having revealing discussions, following trends, and sharing opinions that will shape the perceptions of entire industries. Because of the inherent chaos, however, cutting through that noise is practically impossible. If you’re a business that relies on social media data to plan new products, create cost-effective marketing or keep ahead of user trends, it’s all too easy to find “social listening” a deafening process.

But it doesn’t have to be.

In the right hands, social listening can provide you with new insights into your existing social media analytics. An effective social listening dashboard should be able to tell you, at a glance, exactly what people are saying. This isn’t just a matter of Twitter mentions and keyword results, it’s about providing a greater context so that your company can make intelligent, informed decisions based on real conversations across the social media landscape.

To make the most out of your social listening efforts, it pays to have a firm grasp on some of the core concepts. The following list is by no means comprehensive, but it will provide you with a solid foundation for building the right social listening strategy for your company.

1. Know your goals. It’s a lot easier to see meaningful results from social listening if you know what you are listening for. Are you hoping to follow the sentiment of your market? Are you looking for opportunities to engage with influencers? Is guarding your product’s reputation at the top of your list, or are you looking for an opportunity to tease out a previously hidden customer trend? Knowing what you want to accomplish makes it that much easier to set up your tools in a way that will give you the best results.

2. Get the right data. Even with the most targeted settings and searches, distortions will happen. Don’t jump to conclusions. Because we live in a hugely interconnected online community, it’s easy to mistake the wake of a totally unrelated trend for a wave in your area of focus. An uptick in discussions about “gingham” in 2012 could have sent fabric makers into a tizzy, even though it might just have been a side-effect of millions of people mistyping “Gangnam” because of a popular Korean rap song.

3. Don’t just analyze. Actually listen. There is a true beauty to seeing a complex, chaotic cloud of comments, opinions, and remarks broken down into a simple-to-follow graph or pie chart. Just remember that those gorgeous renderings of trends and sentiments represent an algorithm’s best guess at what the crowd is saying. It pays to wade into the source content, and to actually interact with the people who are shaping those trend lines in the first place.

4. Dissect the process. In the last year, a huge range of software tools for social listening have hit the market. Many of these systems provide great-looking dashboards and seemingly definitive results with clear percentage changes for even the most minor performance tweaks. On the surface, that seems wonderful. But how are they making those assumptions? What precisely are they searching for? How are they interpreting changes? Are they giving you real statistical results, or are they simply pretty toys for telling you how many people used a given hashtag? Most quality vendors will be more than happy to walk you through the nitty gritty details of their service.

5. Put the results to use. Even a casual experiment with social listening will quickly uncover a range of questions, complaints and strong sentiments about any topic, product or company. Making use of that data, however, requires taking action. This doesn’t mean tackling every Twitter user and YouTube commenter head-on. It means knowing your ultimate goals and forming a strategy to see real, measurable results. A simple exchange with the author of a skeptical blog post can yield hugely positive results, for instance, while sparring with random trolls on Reddit might just waste your day.

6. Test the results, challenge the assumptions. As you start to gather data from your social listening experiments, it becomes increasingly important to verify everything. You have specific goals in mind, and a clear strategy for attaining those goals. Now, it’s time to test if your strategy actually moves you closer to the results you want to see. Are those wildly popular Pinterest Boards actually moving the needle on your female buying demographic? Are your LinkedIn contributions resulting in more buzz among industry professionals?

7. Don’t SPAM. This should go without saying. If you’re using your social listening data to inform your engagement strategy, it can be tempting to go overboard with the replies, the “helpful” links and the thinly veiled marketing. People are smart enough to know when they’re being pitched, and if they’re not interested they’ll turn off like a light switch.

8. Influencers matter. As you start to see trends in your social listening dashboard, you’ll probably notice that influential people tend to steer the conversation. If a popular blogger or Twitter user starts posting about a company or a product, that same view tends to echo through the social media landscape. There are few more cost-effective ways to test sentiment than starting with the influencers first, and then watching the results ripple through the data.

9. Customize. Off-the-shelf social-listening tools are generally designed to provide the best data sets for selling social-listening software. While this data can be useful in a broad sense, it doesn’t always provide meaningful, actionable data that’s relevant to your goals. A good social listening system will allow you to fine-tune everything, tuning out as much noise as you can. Take advantage of this.

10. Don’t confuse inbound and outbound conversations. Social listening exists in the overlap between customer relations and marketing, blurring the traditional lines between the two. It’s important to remember, however, that there are still two fundamental kinds of conversations happening in any social media contest: You’re either responding to customers (individually or en masse) or broadcasting to them. Any social-listening system you put in place should differentiate between those two channels, allowing you to track the performance of each.

With the right tools in place, you can follow what the most influential people in your market are saying about your product, what the opinion-makers are saying about your competition, and how your potential customers feel about your industry. It’s now possible to find out who is steering the social media conversation about your topic, the direction they’re steering it in, who is listening, and even where those voices are physically located. While this may sound complex, with the right software behind it these metrics are as easy to follow as website traffic and ad conversions.

By using the best available social listening tools, you’ll be able to drill down to the pivotal moments and key interactions that both create and kill industry buzz. Instead of simply reacting to trends after they’ve already gained momentum, social listening tools allow you to see sentiment as it takes shape. This allows you to do more than simply monitor and measure these trends; it allows you to steer them in ways that were not possible before.

As you master the art and science of social listening, the roiling madness of the train station now becomes simply the set dressing of the narrative. You’re able to pick out those one or two meaningful interactions that result in positive buzz and improved sales, and be able to respond quickly when someone is writing naughty graffiti about your company on the bathroom walls. All of that noise quickly become filtered to pure signal, making it that much easier to focus on doing what your company does best.

Like this:

Why do people say ‘yes’? How can we get them to comply with our requests? I asked my Fripp Associate David Palmer, PhD, MBA, CPA, an expert on negotiations and marketing. David Palmer has read more business books and managements books than any other person I have ever met; without hesitation he always refers to the best book to help anyone in their career is Robert Cialdini’s Influence: Science and Practice. Enjoy my interview. You next logic step is to buy Dr. Cialdini’s book.

“Fortunately, people often say ‘yes’ or agree with requests out of mindless compliance,” David told me. “They are frequently willing to say ‘yes’ automatically without thinking first. It makes their lives simpler and smoother. But what most of us are trying to overcome is the opposite phenomenon, when they’ve programmed themselves to say ‘no’ without thinking about it.

“Here’s where the emotional triggers come in. Researcher Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University describes the ‘Six Weapons of Influence,’ as he calls them, in his book, Influence, Science and Practice (Allyn & Cacon, 2000).”

1. RECIPROCATION – “The Old Give and Take–and Take”

All of us are taught we should find some way to repay others for what they do for us. Most people will make an effort to avoid being considered a moocher, ingrate, or person who does not pay their debts.

This is an extremely powerful tactic and can even spur unequal exchanges.
In one experiment, for example, half the people attending an art appreciation session were offered a soft drink. Afterwards, all were asked if they would buy 25-cent raffle tickets. Guess what? The people who had been offered the soft drinks purchased twice as many raffle tickets, whether or not they had accepted the drinks!

You probably already use this principle, but it is much stronger than you suspect. You can build a sense of indebtedness in someone by delivering a number of uninvited “first favors” over time. They don’t have to be tangible gifts. In today’s world, useful information is one of the most valuable favors you can deliver.

2. COMMITMENT AND CONSISTENCY – “Hobgoblins of the Mind”

Once people have made a choice or taken a stand, they are under both internal and external pressure to behave consistently with that commitment. This desire for consistency offers us all a shortcut to action as we recall a previous decision we have already made.

When you can get someone to commit verbally to an action, the chances go up sharply that they’ll actually do it. For example, before starting your next meeting, ask each person to commit to following the posted agenda. Then, if anyone goes off on a tangent, just ask them to explain how it fits the agenda. If they can’t, they’ll quickly fall back in line.

3. SOCIAL PROOF – “Truths Are Us”

We decide what is correct by noticing what other people think is correct. This principle applies especially to the way we determine what constitutes correct behavior. If everyone else is behaving a certain way, most assume that is the right thing to do. For example, one of the important, and largely unconscious, ways we decide what is acceptable behavior on our current job is by watching the people around us, especially the higher-ups or old timers.

This principle of influence kicks in even more strongly when the situation is uncertain or people aren’t sure what to do. When you can show them what others like them believe or are doing, people are more likely to take the same action. (The mass suicides among the Heavens Gate followers in Southern California and the people in Jonestown are horrible examples of the negative power of this principle.)

On the positive side, product endorsements are the most obvious application of the Social Proof. If you want someone to do something for you, be sure to let them see that many other people are already doing it or are willing to do it. Show them that others like them (and the more like them the better) believe in your product or are using it.

4. LIKING: “The Friendly Thief”

People love to say ‘yes’ to requests from people they know and like. And people tend to like others who appear to have similar opinions, personality traits, background, or lifestyle. More people will say ‘yes’ to you if they like you, and the more similar to them you appear to be, the more likely they are to like you.

Most people are also phenomenal suckers for flattery, even when they know it isn’t true. When we have a good opinion of ourselves, we can accept praise and like those who provide it. (Those with low self-esteem reject even well-earned praise and distrust the source.) All salespeople worth their salt have mastered the flattery tactic. They know it works, but they may not know why.

People also tend to like and trust anything familiar. The best way to build this familiarity is to have frequent, pleasant contacts. For example, if you spend three hours straight with someone you’ve never met before, you would get a sense of who they are. But if you divided the same time into 30-minute segments of pleasant interaction over six consecutive weeks, you would each have a much stronger and positive knowledge about the other. You have established a comfort level, familiarity, and a history with them. Their repeated pleasant contacts with your organization’s services or products helps builds familiarity and liking.

5. AUTHORITY: “Directed Deference”

Most of us are raised with a respect for authority, both real and implied. Sometimes, people confuse the symbols of authority (titles, appearance, possessions) with the true substance.

Some people are more strongly influenced by authority than others, and compliance can vary according to the situation . For example, it’s 11:00 PM, and the doorbell rings. Two men in police uniforms want to come in and ask you some questions. Most people respect such authority enough that they would comply, even though the Constitution says they don’t have to. But if it was 3:00 AM and the men were in street clothes, claiming to be detectives, most of us would hesitate. The men would have to overcome our resistance with more proofs of their authority like badges or a search warrant.

You can put this general principle to use by citing authoritative sources to support your ideas. Look and act like an authority yourself. Be sure others know that your education and experience supports your ideas. Dress like the people who are already in the positions of authority that you seek.

6. SCARCITY: “The Rule of the Few”

Nearly everyone is vulnerable to some form of the principle of scarcity. Opportunities seem more valuable when they are less available. Hard-to-get things are perceived as better than easy-to-get things.

For example, the object you’ve almost decided to buy is out of stock. The salesperson offers to check their other stores. And guess what? A store across town has one left! Do you buy it? Of course!

Whenever appropriate, you can use the Scarcity Principle. Refer to limited resources and time limits to increase the perceived value of the benefits of helping or working with you. The possibility of losing something is a more powerful motivator than of gaining something. Let others (a customer, your boss, a lover) know what they will be losing if they don’t say ‘yes’ to your offer.